Billy Shaw lives in a palace. Potter's Pleasure Palace, the best entertainment venue in Yorkshire, complete with dancing, swing-boats and a roller-skating rink.

When it is arranged for him to become companion to the child at the big house above the valley, Billy leaves home to find a wild, peculiar boy in a curiously haphazard household where nothing that's meant is said and the air is thick with secrets. Before long, tragedy strikes and facts become entangled with fictions. It's left to Anna Sallis, almost a century later, to unravel the knots and find the truth.

Bookclub May 2018 - part of our Read Regional .

I loved the setting in Yorkshire, it was very atmospheric (particularly in winter) and I would have loved to have visited the Palace in it's heyeday, However somehow I could not warm to some of characters much. Jasper was such a nasty person and I took against him straight away. Edie and Charles Harper were pretty one dimensional to me too. The only more real people I think were Anna and Frank. They kept me interested in the story and the family history.

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Caught at the Old Gang meet up. Thank you!

I have been struggling to get immersed in this one, so rather than hold onto it, I'll be setting it free again soon.

Caught at the Bookfest meetup, thank you

To start with I found the writing a little stilted, but as the novel developed, the flow improved a lot. I wouldn't say the characters were brilliantly drawn, but I found Billy intriguing. Pragmatic yet ambitious from the start, he spends so much time calculating how to impress/please/satisfy other characters throughout the novel that his own personality sometimes seems muted. Whilst he's obviously capable of kindness and affection, he's also quite a cold fish. Given that we see many secondary characters such as Jasper, Edie and Charles almost entirely from his perspective, it's perhaps no wonder that they come across as a bit one-dimensional. He uses them to further his ambition, but doesn't seem particularly fond of any of them.

Anna was a thoroughly nicer individual and the contrast between her and Billy's motivations gave the novel greater balance than it would otherwise have had. In early chapters I found her curiosity a bit over the top, but as more and more clues emerged, I admit to being hooked right in and finished the second half of the book in just one day.

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